The TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

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October 31, 2015

Kelmscott Manor, Gloucestershire, by William Morris; frontispiece to News from Nowhere, c.1892

By MICHAEL CAINES

Take a piece of A4 paper. Fold it in half (reducing it to A5 size), then twice more (A6; A7). A little more unfolding and refolding, interrupted by one snip of the scissors, and there you have it – a booklet of eight pages. Stitch it and trim the edges. Now all you have to do is cover it with suitable words and pictures . . . .

October 30, 2015

Underground in a bar with exposed brickwork, shiny tiling and hundreds of bare light bulbs massed together on the ceiling, in London's no longer all that trendy area of Shoreditch, a sell-out crowd of a hundred young women has come to listen to the eighty-four-year-old Egyptian psychiatrist Dr Nawal El Saadawi.

October 28, 2015

Sir John Soane – like his house (now a museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields), his architecture and his writing – is peculiar and perplexing. Without him the Dulwich Picture Gallery wouldn’t look like it does, nor phoneboxes: the family tomb Soane designed and built for his wife Eliza, after her death in 1815, in St Pancras Old Churchyard (one of only two Grade I listed monuments still standing in London; the other is Karl Marx’s tomb in Highgate Cemetery) apparently inspired Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s design of the British red telephone box.

A fanciful, colour-washed painting (above) of this monument (alongside original drawings created by Soane’s architectural office) is on display in a new exhibition, Death and Memory: Soane and the architecture of legacy, at the Soane Museum. Obsessed with funerary architecture, Soane didn’t simply make the tomb a memorial to his wife; it also commemorates his favourite architectural motifs. Here we have a square-based shallow dome, incised pilasters, an abundance of ancient death symbolism.

October 26, 2015

There was a full house on Friday night in Tavistock Square for Siri Hustvedt in conversation with Dr Johanna Hartmann. Many in the crowd had spent the day attending events that focused on Hustvedt’s work, including panel discussions about trauma narratives, authorship and gender – all elements of a conference hosted by Birkbeck University as part of the Bloomsbury Festival.

Hustvedt began the evening by reading from a forthcoming collection of essays – in particular from a “200-page essay” called “The Delusions of Certainty”, which probes definitions of the mind. Hustvedt characteristically returns here to “first questions”: “is [the mind] different from the brain?”; “am I my mind?"; does the body think? (First questions are important, she later said; "most scholarly life asks the 347th question, which is propped up by the 346 before".) The essay followed the arguments of Descartes, Hobbes and Margaret Cavendish, among others, but the effect was entirely modern.

October 25, 2015

On this day 600 years ago, a depleted invading army faced an outnumbering defensive force across a ploughed field in Normandy. The English invaders had lost some of their numbers to dysentery – the “bloody flux” – and had been forced to leave 1,200 of their comrades behind to garrison the devastated town they had managed to capture after an extended siege. A fourteen-day march through hostile country had led them eventually to this stretch of open ground bordered by woods, where they took up position and waited for the French army, filled with princes of the blood, to attack.

October 23, 2015

The novelist Kamila Shamsie suggested in the summer that 2018 could be a year of publishing only women – which I'd be very happy with, if her male counterparts could find alternative employment for a little while (it would do some of them a lot of good) – but first, please can we make 2017 a year of avoiding one particular long-dead male author?

October 21, 2015

Victor Hugo first visited Belgium, accompanied by his mistress Juliette Drouet, in 1837. He described the seventeenth-century baroque belfry in Mons as resembling a large coffeepot flanked by four smaller teapots. “It would be ugly if it wasn’t grand”, he wrote to his wife Adèle back in France.

The belfry, which looks down on cobbled streets and squares, is one of several UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the Wallonian region; nearby is the Grand-Hornu, an old mining complex (the region was a coal-mining centre until the 1980s), built between 1810 and 1830. That was designated a World Heritage Site in 2012 and now houses a Museum of Contemporary Arts.

October 20, 2015

Last weekend I went to the Barbican for this year’s Battle of Ideas – two days of “high-level, thought-provoking public debate”. “From Literature to Twitter: The death of the reader?” was the vague title of one such discussion, but it was perhaps thanks to that vagueness that the debate proved fruitful.

October 13, 2015

Marlon James has won the Man Booker Prize with A Brief History of Seven Killings.

"It’s a sign of Marlon James’s unusual brilliance", said the TLS reviewer Paul Genders, "that a book so much about death is also teeming with life."

This novel, Genders said, provides a corrective to many fixed ideas about both criminal life and James’s homeland, Jamaica. The story ranges across two decades of Jamaica’s history and is told through several first-person accounts. The crime that sets off the seven killings of the title is an attack on "The Singer", a character based on Bob Marley.

Michael Wood, chair of the judges, said that the panel had come to a unanimous decision in less than two hours.